Friday, March 06, 2009

It doesn't seem that Costco has an official support site for the Kirkland brand inkjet paper that they sell, so no color profiles are available. Never fear, The Dima is to the rescue!

Well at least for those of you that are using an Epson Stylus Pro 3800 with the Ultrachrome K3 ink-set.

I have created a custom profile using outstanding test-charts by Bill Atkinson that he provides for free to all interested parties.

I used a 1452 RGB target which was measured three times and averaged using weighted method to compensate for the possible measurement errors.

In order to use this profile successfully you must use following settings when you print out of Photoshop or any other color aware application:

Setup a soft-proofing space as such: View>Proof Setup>Custom>Device to Simulate>EPSONKirkProGloss.icc. Chose either perceptual or relative colorimetric intent, tick the black point compensation. (You must have a calibrated and preferably profiled monitor for this to work well)

Print your file with the following settings: Photoshop manages color. Intent that matches the one you setup in your soft-proof settings.

In the printer driver chose custom. Use Premium SemiGloss paper setting, it will change your black to photoblacK if it's not already active.

Under the Custom, click advanced and choose SuperPhoto 2880 as your resolution.

8 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Thank you so very much for this long awaited and highly accurate profile for Epson 3800/Kirkland Pro Glossy, as well as the print settings. I have searched many times for a good profile for this paper. Finally! And my prints show an instant improvement. Prior to this I was using a strange combination of Premium Glossy Photo paper, Photo Enhance and a very old printer profile for the Epson 3000. that seemed to work okay in CS2 and CS3. But this week I upgraded to CS4 and I could not get an accurate print. I spent the last three days and a lot of ink and paper trying many different settings, and researching printer settings on the web. I also had the problem that my old settings would not "stick" in the print/driver box in CS4, even after saving custom settings. This is possibly due to incompatible settings now that CS4 has a few different options. I could get one correct print, but if I went right back to the same print without closing the image, the settings had gone back to a default, everytime. While this is still happening to some extent, your profile/settings seem to have greatly improved, if not completely fixed this issue. I can't thank you enough for saving me many more hours of frustration. Great work!Grateful in Seattle

I thank you, too, for your hard work and generosity in sharing the profile for Epson 3800/Kirkland Pro Glossy. I have tried many combinations, including a profile that I created, and none come close to the gorgeous results produced by your profile.Thanks from Port Sydney, Ontario, Canada

Betty, while R2400 is using the same set of inks as the 3800, as well as the droplet size and the vertical print resolution, I am sure that the screening algorithms are not the same. Therefore I would not guaranty that this profile would work. If you try this and get good results, do comment on here later, it would be interesting to know.